A physicist's argument for God
From the kingdom of the substance to the realm of the Spirit
Modern atheists like to paint a picture of Christianity as inherently anti-intellectual. It’s a powerful way to dissuade people from faith, particularly young people, and I’m sorry to say it worked on me when I was a young atheist.
However, once I started to emerge from the intellectual fog of atheism, all it took was a little research to discover that this view of Christianity simply isn’t true. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.
The list of Christian intellectuals throughout history is impressively long and populated by people who were giants in their respective fields. For instance, it was Isaac Newton, and his predecessor Galileo, who transformed the field of physics from a quasi-scientific undertaking into a powerful evidence-based enterprise that depends on observation and experiment.
Another revolutionary in science, German physicist Max Planck, is widely regarded as the father of quantum mechanics. Planck was also a Christian who commented on his faith in the context of his scientific work. Some of his better known quotes, translated from German into English, are easy to find, but some of the lesser known quotes remain obscured from the English-speaking world. The following quote, from a lecture delivered to his fellow scientists1, is inexplicably one of the latter.
I asked a friend of mine—a polyglot who counted German among the languages he spoke fluently—to translate this part of Planck’s lecture into English.
Gentlemen, as a physicist, the whole of whose life is one of sober science, the dedicated research of matter, surely I am free from any suspicion of holding any illusions.
And so I say this after my explorations of the atom: there is no matter as such.
All matter evolves and there is only one force, which causes everything from the oscillation of atoms, up to the smallest solar system of the universe [the atom] to hold together. Since there exists in the whole universe neither an intelligent force nor an eternal force, and humanity has not succeeded in discovering any long-awaited cause of perpetual motion—so we must hypothesize a deliberate intelligent spirit behind this force. This spirit is the foundation of all matter. A visible but not corruptible matter is real, true, authentic, because matter without the spirit cannot be—but the invisible, immortal Spirit is the reality! Also since a spirit cannot exist by itself, but every spirit belongs to an entity, we are forced to assume that there exist spiritual beings. However, since spirit beings cannot come into being by themselves, but must be created, so I am not shy to designate this mysterious creator, as him, whom all civilizations of the earth have called in earlier millennia: God! In this, the physicist, in dealing with the subject matter of the will, must travel from the kingdom of the substance to the realm of the Spirit. And so that is our task in the end, and we must place our research in the hands of philosophy.
Thus Planck methodically deduced from his work on the nature of matter that God must be real. An intriguing idea!
Note the correspondence between Planck’s description of how everything in the universe is held together by this “force” with what the Bible tells us about Jesus’ relationship to the universe:
He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. —Colossians 1:17
He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. —Hebrews 1:3
Superficially, some of science seems to point away from God, but that’s an illusion. The deeper you go into the workings of the universe, the more science points back to Christianity. This is why another great quantum physicist, Werner Heisenberg, said that a little knowledge inclines people to atheism, but a lot of knowledge brings them back to God.
This is an updated and edited reprint of an article from my old blog.
The original quote can be found in the journal, Lebendige Erde, No 3/84 p 133. I gratefully acknowledge G.P. Orris, who translated this passage by request.
"However, since spirit beings cannot come into being by themselves, but must be created, so I am not shy to designate this mysterious creator, as him, whom all civilizations of the earth have called in earlier millennia: God!" Certainly the Big Bang is an act of creation, an explosion of information into a new space we call the Universe. From God's perspective, a very small space, so we--or someone--can/could exist (which is why I consider the "universe" a very nebulous and inaccurate term). Tough to determine from our point of view. But we're getting there.
"All matter evolves and there is only one force..."
Interesting claim. It is above my pay grade, but is this challengeable? He is making a claim, is that already generally accepted or could someone have said, in effect, cite your source?